Along the lines of TV shows like Pimp My Ride, I’m thinking of
regularly blogging something along the lines of Pimp My Emacs. For
those readers who haven’t had to listen to me bubble for hours on end
about this text editor / way of life, Emacs is ostensibly a program
that you use to edit text files. Right. But because it’s insanely
programmable, there are all sorts of interesting things for it, like
more than five ways to read one’s e-mail.

As the VP Education of Toast I.T. Toastmasters in downtown Toronto, I’m responsible for assigning people roles in upcoming meetings and confirming these roles by e-mail. We currently do our scheduling in a spreadsheet. Copying and pasting the roles for the spreadsheet results in the following text:

I like sending snail mail. This Emacs Lisp snippet displays all the
contacts for whom I have addresses, sorted according to country. This
makes it easy for me to, say, jump to all the USA contacts whom I
should mail before heading back over the border.

Because a Big Brother Database of my contacts isn’t complete if I
don’t keep track of what e-mail I sent them and when I sent it, this
bit of Emacs Lisp code adds Gnus subjects to the BBDB records of the
people to whom I sent e-mail.

It should be really easy to set up Gnus to expand some kind of
!followup macro into a TODO item in my planner and an “I hope to hear
from you by ….”. Ridiculously easy with Emacs Lisp and an insanely
customizable editor, but I might not have enough battery life. I’ve
got 28 minutes, and then I’m off PC for a while.